THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF

Chapter 7

Dr. Elias Penn came to Ashby Grange on the third morning of the four days.

Evelyn knew him before she saw him. She knew the sound of his carriage on the gravel — the offside wheel had a squeak it had had for years — and she knew the particular briskness of the knock. He had come to the house twice a year for as long as she could remember, always in a black coat, always with a leather case, always leaving with a glass of her father’s best brandy and a folded paper in his pocket.

As a child she had thought he was a friend of the family.

Now she stood at the top of the servant’s stair with her heart going like a clock and watched him cross the hall below.

The library door closed.

There was a small cupboard beside the chimney breast in the library — a place where the hot-water pipes ran — and behind it, a gap in the panelling where the boards had shrunk. Evelyn had found it when she was nine, hiding from a governess. She had never told a soul.

She lay along the dusty floor with her cheek to the boards and listened.

“—signed and sealed, Elias, but I tell you the girl is asking questions.”

“The girl is marrying the Duke of Halstead on Friday. Let her ask.”

“She was up in the attic.”

A chair scraped. Someone poured. Evelyn heard the liquid and the glass and the swallow.

“Did she find anything?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“You know,” said Dr. Penn, and there was nothing hurried in his voice at all, “that the papers are not in the house. They were moved. You signed the transfer years ago and you know it.”

“There was more. There was a second bundle. Emmeline kept—”

“Percival.”

Silence.

“Say it properly,” said Dr. Penn.

Sir Percival said something Evelyn could not hear.

“It does not matter,” said Penn. “The woman is four hundred miles away in a house that takes no visitors, and she has been there fifteen years, and she will die there, and no one will ever read anything she wrote, because everything she wrote was declared the product of a disordered mind the day she arrived. That is the beauty of the thing, Percival. It is not a lie. It is a record.” A pause. “A record is stronger than a lie. A lie can be argued with.”

More silence. Evelyn pressed her forehead into the dust.

“You’re frightened,” Penn observed.

“I am not frightened. I am—” Paper rustled. “The Duke bought my debts.”

“Yes. I heard.”

“Every one of them. He owns me.”

“Then be owned,” said Dr. Penn comfortably. “There are worse. He wants your daughter and your name and your property. Let him have them. You keep your throat.”

“That is charming, coming from the man who signed the certificate.”

“I have signed a great many certificates,” said Dr. Penn. “That is what I am for.”

Evelyn heard the chair scrape again. She should have gone — she should have been gone already — but her body would not move, and so she was still lying there when the library door opened and Dr. Penn came out into the hall alone.

He stopped.

He looked up the servant’s stair, directly at the shadow where she lay.

For three full seconds he did not move. He was a small man, neat, grey about the temples, with the mild face of a country physician who had delivered half the babies in the parish.

Then he smiled. Not at anybody. Just at the dark.

“Ghosts in this house,” he said pleasantly, to the empty hall. “They do run in families.”

And he put on his hat quite unhurriedly, and went out, and drove away.

Evelyn stayed where she was until she heard the squeaking wheel leave the gravel. Then she rose, and shook the dust from her skirt, and went to her room, and sat down at the little writing desk, and did something she had never done in twenty-three years of being told to be quiet.

She wrote it all down.

Every word of it. The letters, the names, the dates, the phrase there was a second bundle, the phrase declared the product of a disordered mind the day she arrived. She wrote in her smallest hand on both sides of the paper, and she folded it, and she sealed it with candle wax she had no seal to press, and she addressed it in block letters to S. Vane, Duke of Halstead, Halstead House, London.

Then she sat back and looked at it.

Because the letter was not the plan. The letter was the insurance. A letter can be taken from a woman. A letter can be burned. What Evelyn intended to do with what she knew, she intended to do in person, on Friday, with her own mouth — because no one had ever thought to be afraid of her mouth, and that was, she had realised in the grey light of the third morning, the single greatest advantage she had ever been given.

She hid the letter inside the lining of her trunk.

And she went down to dinner, and she smiled at her father, and she asked him — sweetly, in front of the servants, so that his answer would have witnesses — whether she might have her mother’s grey shawl after all.

He went white.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I am going to the churchyard. I want to see the stone before I marry.”